Washington Post: Facing withering criticism from across the political spectrum and abandoned by Senate allies, House Republicans bowed to political reality Thursday and agreed to a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.

The agreement represented a remarkable capitulation on the part of House Republicans, who had two days earlier rejected such a deal with Democrats as the kind of half-measure that their new majority was elected to thwart.

And it amounts to a Christmas gift for President Obama, who attempted to paint his Republican opponents as willing to raise taxes for millions of Americans. Such an image could have cost the party politically just as it is gearing up to try to take back the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Eugene Robinson: Finally. After a year of artful camouflage and concealment, Republicans let us glimpse the rift between establishment pragmatists and Tea Party ideologues. There may be hope for the republic after all.

…. There are only two possible reasons for House Republicans to behave the way they did. Maybe they are so blinded by ideology that they no longer care about the impact their actions might have on struggling American families. Or maybe their only guiding principle is that anything Obama supports, they oppose.

The week’s events offer a lesson for Obama, too. One reason for all the Republican angst was that public opinion has become more sensitive to issues of economic justice. This may be partly due to the Occupy protests. But I’m convinced that Obama’s fiery barnstorming in favor of his American Jobs Act has played a big role. People are hearing his message.

The president has been on the offensive. It’s no coincidence that, for the first time in quite a while, Republicans are backing up.

Steve Benen: …. the GOP leadership will, probably later today, bring the tweaked Senate agreement to the House floor, hoping to approve it by unanimous consent. If Republicans balk – and they might – Boehner will reconvene the House next week for an up-or-down vote. Since that vote would very likely pass the Senate bill, an objection today would only delay the inevitable, and extend this fiasco for a few more days.

…. perhaps one of the most striking realizations from this entire dispute is that Republicans gambled that Democrats would cave when the pressure was on – and Democrats didn’t. Arguably for the first time all year, Democrats from the White House to Capitol Hill knew they had the better hand, told Republicans that Dems wouldn’t fold this time, and sat back and watched and the GOP unraveled.

… After a year in which policymakers have moved from one hostage crisis to another, Democrats won a big one to close out the year, leaving Republicans looking awful and a weakened Speaker looking beaten.

For a party that earned a reputation for capitulating a little too often, it’ll start 2012 on the right foot.

Vice President Biden in the Des Moines Register: Mitt Romney recently laid out his plan for America. Reading about it, I thought of my dad. My dad was a hard worker. He took pride in what he did. And, like millions of Americans, that pride was put to the test when he found himself struggling to make ends meet.

When I was a child, he had to ask my grandfather to take care of my mom, my brother, sister and I while he moved away to find a better job in Wilmington, Del. My dad had a saying: “A job is about more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity. It’s about respect.”….

Michael Tomasky (Daily Beast): Last week, I mentioned the racism charges against Ron Paul, involving the newsletter he used to publish and some of the vile and witless statements therein….

….These are not your run-of-the-mill euphemisms. These are blatantly racist comments by, I would hope, nearly any measure. Jews and gays get their moment in the sun ….The “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism,” produced after the Los Angeles riots, offers many gems, including this advice: “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.” …. It would seem, in the pages of something called the Ron Paul Political Report, that that “I” would represent, well, Ron Paul. But he denies authorship….

…. If he didn’t write those sentences, who did? Why not say? If he genuinely disagrees with the statements and truly disavows them, there could be no good reason not to name names.

… I humbly suggest that there are some matters on which there should not a statute of limitations …. Calling a group of people—identifiable only by their race “animals” belongs in that company. We lack proof that Paul did that, but at the very least we have proof that he has regarded this whole thing very casually….

Greg Sargent: The President is set to hold another event today urging the House GOP to support the Senate payroll tax extension compromise…. A White House official emails that Obama today “will be joined by Americans who would see their taxes go up if the House Republicans fail to act”.

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Washington Post: House Republicans faced mounting pressure Wednesday from critics inside and outside Congress who worry that their standoff with President Obama over whether to extend a payroll tax cut could do lasting damage to the GOP.

… The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board captured the frustration among Republicans in the paper’s Wednesday editions, asking whether the GOP’s handling of the tax debate “might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said the House GOP must get past the issue. “Are Republicans getting killed now in public opinion? There’s no question,” he said Wednesday on CNBC. “Both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that this is going to happen, and probably the best thing to happen now is just to get it over with.”

Marketwatch: The number of Americans filing initial claims for regular state unemployment-insurance benefits fell 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 364,000 in the week ended Dec. 17, reaching the lowest level since April 2008, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected that claims would rise to 375,000, while remaining at levels historically associated with an improving labor market.

The four-week average of initial claims – a smoother gauge than the weekly data – fell 8,000 to 380,250, the lowest level since June 2008.

Steve Benen: It’s generally wise to avoid sweeping conclusions about week-to-week changes in data like this, but when these jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it’s evidence of an improving jobs landscape. When the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

Michael Tomasky: President Obama has had an awful year. But thanks to the politically asinine miscalculations of House Republicans, he’s ending 2011 with a bang.

For a bunch of people who don’t believe that Barack Obama celebrates Christmas, Republicans sure are going out of their way to make sure the president has a merry one. The short-sighted stupidity of the House Republicans is hardly to be believed. The presidential nomination contest is as unsettled as ever and still features a bunch of candidates who are about as appealing to most Americans as Aunt Gladys’s fruitcake.

…. It’s all a reminder that Obama won’t be running just against a Republican candidate. He’ll be running, as he has been, against a Republican Congress. And the public is finally getting the message that they are breathing a different kind of air from the rest of us.

Paul Krugman: David Roberts reports on the EPA’s decision, finally, to regulate mercury from coal plants … it will save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. This is actually a much bigger issue, when it comes to saving American lives, than terrorism.

…. The point that strikes me most, however, is that this shows that it matters who holds the White House. You can complain about Obama’s lack of a strong progressive agenda, which I sometimes do, or wonder what good it is to hold the White House when the other side blocks every attempt to do good through legislation. But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president.

Elections have consequences, and this is one delayed consequence of 2008 that will make a big difference.

Obama’s approval rating is soft, but new polls of South Carolina and Florida show him ahead of Gingrich and Romney. Michael Tomasky asks: could the GOP be headed for disaster?

How can Barack Obama, as this new NBC/Marist poll has it, be beating Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in South Carolina, of all places? …. Is it conceivable that 10 months and three weeks from now, Obama could actually win the state? If it happens, we will know that the Republicans are headed off the cliff. And that is precisely where we should all hope they go.

…. now let’s look at the Florida numbers from the NBC/Marist poll. There Obama is beating both Romney and Gingrich by outside the margin of error. He leads Romney 48-41 and Gingrich 51-39.

…. if Obama holds Florida, he can afford to lose Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and either Michigan or Pennsylvania, and still rack up a winning 270 electoral votes. But of course, if he’s winning Florida, he’s likely not losing any of those other states, with the exception of Indiana….

Ten months and three weeks is a long, long time. But today’s poll suggests that a wipeout of such proportions is not unimaginable….

Washington Post: Against the backdrop of a tightening Republican presidential contest, much of the hierarchy of President Obama’s campaign is decamping from Chicago to Washington on Tuesday for a high-profile debriefing on the the state of the president’s reelection effort.

…. At the top of the list is an erratic Republican presidential field roiled by the ascent of Newt Gingrich, whom the Democrats view as a weak challenger to the president. They also take some credit for the Gingrich surge, because it appears to have partly been a result of a devastating video attack on Mitt Romney produced by Obama’s longtime admaker.

A speech by Obama last week in Kansas – a searing attack on GOP economic policies – was hailed by one liberal critic as the “most important economic speech of his presidency.” This week, Obama is celebrating the end of the U.S. war in Iraq, making good on one of this central campaign promises. Even the unemployment rate has dipped.

….. senior Obama advisers and supporters are cautiously pointing to signs that perhaps the president’s fortunes have turned a corner. Among their favorites: the laundry list of politically tricky statements that front-runners Romney and Gingrich have made during the Republican race….

NY Daily News: Julianne Moore didn’t bring her research on Sarah Palin home with her ….. the flame-haired actress told us she “read every single thing” she could about the Grizzly Mama and “watched every interview” in order to prepare for her role as the former Alaska governor in next spring’s HBO mini-series, “Game Change.”

But when we asked Moore if she’d developed a newfound respect for Palin after delving deeper into her life, the actress, 51, raised an eyebrow and sighed deeply. “No,” she said quietly.

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Rudy Giuliani to Piers Morgan: “My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats…You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

Michael Webber (Chron.com): As Republican presidential candidates like Gov. Rick Perry tout their energy plans, they would do well to study our best energy president in decades: President Obama.

Advocates for the U.S. energy industry routinely say they wish President Obama would pursue pro-growth energy policies. Well, he has been, and not just for the likes of fallen green giants like Solyndra. Under Obama, the traditional U.S. energy sector is flourishing. The domestic energy sector is experiencing its largest growth since the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s. As importantly, we’re growing in the right directions.

For the first time in decades, we are seeing sustained increases in U.S. oil production and decreases in oil consumption, which means imports are dropping.

U.S. domestic oil production is up an incredible 14 percent since Obama took office. A few years ago we imported nearly two-thirds of our petroleum products. Today we import less than half. The reduction in imports means tens of billions of dollars now stay in our own economy.

But it’s not just oil: dry natural gas production is up 16 percent, natural gas liquids are up 26 percent, solar generation is up 14 percent and wind generation is up 59 percent. Even production of coal – supposedly the main target of Obama’s policies – is flat over that same time period. There are even headlines blaring that U.S. refining capacity is at the highest point in decades, exceeding levels achieved under recent Republican administrations. All of this growth produces royalties and taxes to address our budget challenges.

….. In light of all the bad news about partisan debt fights, maybe we can all celebrate the good news that U.S. energy policy – against all odds – is finally reaping significant rewards for all of us. Our Energy President deserves a fair share of the credit.

Washington Post: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will visit the White House on Thursday to attend a retirement ceremony there for her husband, astronaut and U.S. Navy Capt. Mark Kelly.

… According to a statement issued by Giffords’ congressional office, Vice Presidnent Joe Biden will administer a retirement oath, and he and Kelly will each give brief remarks at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at 1 p.m.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden will attend the ceremony, along with a handful of Kelly’s and Giffords’s colleagues in Congress and at NASA.

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Steve Benen: knew, if we waited long enough, we’d see Sarah Palin make a sensible decision: “Sarah Palin is not running for president.”

…. Jon Stewart joked just a week ago, “So, here’s the thing. You can have a colorful bus and drive to early primary states or you can go around telling people what you would do if you were president. But when you put those two together, there’s really only two possibilities: you are either running for the president of the United States, or you are a crazy person.”

It would appear we now know which of these two possibilities is correct.

CBS: President Obama will embark on another bus tour later this month to sell his $447 billion jobs plan, a White House official confirms. The president will travel through North Carolina and Virginia to continue his vigorous campaign on behalf of his American Jobs Act.

Time: Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will not seek the Republican nomination to challenge Barack Obama for the White House, she said in a statement sent to TIME.

“After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States,” Palin wrote in a statement from her home in Wasilla, Alaska. “As always, my family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision. When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country. My decision maintains this order.”

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A statement from God: “Leave me out of it, freak.”

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I entered the interwebs’ dark side ….. it’s like a funeral over there. Sorry, I shouldn’t 😆

I’m crushed, but not yet sure I believe it.

we have all suffered a great loss

Romney is getting the nomination. I am beyond pissed

This country is through. It’s all over.

Why did she have us wait?

I thought she loved America? I feel sick to my stomach. She owes those of us who bought her books and supported her financially a explaination and an apology.

Well, sh!t. It looks more and more like we’re going to be stuck with Romney.

This was the worst decision she could have made……I am crushed beyond belief and wonder what they threatened her with to get her out, she was always running and we all knew it.

I will not be supporting her in the future, she left us hanging and hoping and YES I’m disappointed but now I will send my support to Mr. Cain. I guess I’ll eat ‘crow’ for the next few weeks, just today I stopped by walmart and bought her video…it is unopened so I will return it.

Sarah is NOT running… I am sorry. God must have another plan for her.

She is letting her country down and that is a disgrace. Doesnt she have any guts at all ? She just freaking rolled over and conceded victory to her enemies. she does owe people an apology and an explaination. What the hell is wrong with her ?

I feel so sad and I don’t know why.

Just read it on Fox. I am saddened at this news. Now what? 😦

sick to my stomach ….crushed….totally gobsmacked

What the hell is wrong with her ? Does anyone have an answer ? If this is how she is, I wouldnt hire her to run an ice cream shop. She is a person with little purpose nationally now and I can believe she just folded like a coward.

Palin could have turned it around. There isn’t another Palin in the wings. America is finished, and Palin did it.

…her decision has hurt so many people…..people who had built great hope with this woman…..as well as I….personally I don’t want to hear or see her for a great while.

She will be on the record with Greta tonight and for the first time I WILL NOT be watching….betrayed is not the word that is strong enough for me, I was ready to help, I was ready to give, and I will NOT be running over to Walmart now for the DVD, which I went to get at 5am this morning….glad I didn’t get it.

While I am bummed, I have a strong feeling, Palin is being led by God.

Oh crap! I have no one to support now!

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90% of them say they’ll support Cain now. Why? One of them posted this:

Steve Benen: It appears that one of the day’s biggest political stories yesterday, at least on the right, had to do with a Labor Day speech Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. delivered in Detroit. This has “manufactured outrage” written all over it ….

….here’s the context of the quote: “Everybody here’s got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much!”

In other words, he was talking about voting. This was not a call to violence – Hoffa wants to take the far-right politicians out of office, not out of existence.

… A paid CNN analyst said that if President Obama “doesn’t condemn” the comments, “he is sanctioning violence.” This is all pretty silly. If the right is comfortable with Rick Perry’s comments about Ben Bernanke, and Sarah Palin’s “reload” cliche, and Mitt Romney talking about “hanging” Obama, I think conservatives can probably stop clutching the pearls over Hoffa’s line about voting.

“One of the oldest online magazines, Salon.com, has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent decline.”

37 percent! And Salon chuckles at the drop in the President’s approval ratings!

Poor Joan ‘I resent African Americans who say THEY are THE BASE’ Walsh. There she was on Twitter tonight, frantically dismissing the story because she said it came from Fox. Except the stats quoted weren’t from Fox, they were from Compete.com, as some truly heartless Twitterers pointed out.

There was a time I avoided reading him, in a life’s-way-too-short kind of way, the guy’s interminable hysteria and bitterness zzzzz-inducing. Truly, the king of vitriol had become a parody of himself. There were times – and forgive me for this – that I actually felt sorry for him. He made Dan Choi seem like a well-balanced, chilled-out kind of dude.

Now, though, I read him occasionally because the entertainment levels are just fantastic!

Yes, it usually takes him about 10,000 words to make a single point, when really five would do: “I hate Obama, like totally”. But there are so many laugh-out-loud moments in his tirades it’s like you’re reading The Onion.

Today he was attacking Michael Tomasky for his “this may be a truly great foreign-policy president in the making” post on the Daily Beast (here), while also sneering at Ezra Klein and Steve Benen for pieces they had written recently that acknowledged the President’s achievements and the depth of opposition and obstruction he faces.

Greenwald’s narcissism, as we know, won’t tolerate any one disagreeing with his point of view, and the fella pretty much needs to be sedated when supposed fellow ‘progressives’ (*) refuse to join him in spitting bile all over the President. So, we can expect more of these ‘Oh My God! Tomasky, Klein and Benen are, like, totally brainwashed Obot sheeple, besotted with the exotic Dear Leader’ tantrums. Lots more.

(* Greenwald is not and has never been a ‘progressive’ – see his views on immigration below. He’s a part-time Libertarian, but generally this privileged white boy sits on the sidelines and sneers at the efforts of any elected representative who tries to change things for the better, even if, thanks to the political system, that change can only be incremental.)

(What? It’s tacky to use a child in an argument? Okay, but tell that to Glenn ‘Obama slaughters babies’ Greenwald).

We can only hope a brighter day will come for that boy, and all Libyans. If it does, as Tomasky (no friend of the President) argued, it will be partly because of the President’s response to the uprising in the country.

But, Greenwald is still insisting that President Obama’s foreign policy is as morally depraved as Dick Cheney’s. Ah, but remember when Cheney’s name was celebrated around that part of the world? No? Okay.

But why, exactly, has Greenwald upped his vitriol?

It could be that he sees no credible GOP candidate emerging who could beat the President next year. Let’s face it, his beloved Gary Johnson and Ron Paul have as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as Bernie Sanders.

“….illegal immigrants have poured into the United States by the millions … The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known, and it gets worse every day. In short, illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.“

“There already is a “closed sign on the border” when it comes to illegal immigration. It’s called the law. The problem is that the “closed sign” isn’t being enforced because the Federal Government, which has its interfering, power-hungry hands in virtually everything else, has abdicated its duty in one of the very few areas where it was actually meant to be: border security.”

Note the aggression and venom in the language. No one, I think, would argue that illegal immigration isn’t an issue that has to be dealt with – hopefully with a revived DREAM Act – but a “parade of evils”? What? People, often desperate for a new and better life for their families, who enter America illegally, are a “parade of evils”?

How progressive!

But look, maybe it’s Salon’s sinking traffic and the firebaggers’ funding going through the floor (here and here) (remember, he once profited handsomely from his collaboration with Jane ‘Grover Norquist’s best buddy’ Hamsher), that has driven him over the edge?

Who knows?

But….

“One of the oldest online magazines, Salon.com, has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent decline.”

*** For those with weak stomachs, warning: the Rove creature appears in this clip ***

Politicususa: Greta Van Sustern lost control of the narrative tonight on her Fox show, as Karl Rove got in shot after shot to Greta’s BFF Sarah Palin (Greta’s husband is the unofficial man behind SarahPAC). Rove served an ace with his numerous references to Sarah Palin’s thin skin. Thin skin does not a Presidential candidate make.

Media Matters (July 2010): On the July 9 edition of Fox News’ On the Record, Newt Gingrich pointed out to host Greta Van Susteren that she should know what a wonderful person Sarah Palin because “you’ve probably covered her more than anybody in the country”.

There’s a likely reason for that, which neither Gingrich nor Van Susteren mentioned: Van Susteren’s husband, John Coale, served as an adviser to Palin after the 2008 presidential campaign.

…. Coale said he started Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, as well as a legal defense fund for her. SarahPAC, by the way, issued the Palin-centric video that Van Susteren was promoting on her show for the second night in a row during Gingrich’s appearance …. Van Susteren has repeatedly failed to disclose her husband’s ties with Palin…..